- Kable, Monday 5 October 2009 16.24 BST
Many people became aware of the service when Stephen Fry used it to let thousands of people know he was stuck in a lift. A growing number of politicians and top Whitehall officials have begun to use it. And David Cameron has been quite rude about it. Twitter has not been around for long, but over the past year it has made a dent on the public consciousness and is being taken seriously as a means of reaching out to all kinds of communities.
The essence of the service is short, sharp messages; not the kind of medium for explaining policies, but useful for passing on brief news and comments and letting people know what's going on in your world. The government's director of digital engagement, Andrew Stott, has been posting tweets since the spring, and Whitehall now has a semi-official strategy for using the service, developed by Neil Williams, the head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
It would be premature to claim that Twitter is becoming embedded in government, but it has made a mark and its supporters claim that it is helping public sector officials and politicians communicate in a more informal manner, and reach some people who were previously outside of the loop. A growing number of public bodies are experimenting with the service and some say they are happy with the results.
LB Hillingdon has now been using Twitter for over a year, having created an account in June 2008 and encouraged people to become followers through its website and magazine. e-Communications manager Stephen Cross says the number of followers has fluctuated but at the end of August was about 540. The council has no demographic information on these people, but he believes that most are aged between their 20s and 50s.
"The immediate attraction was that it was an easy to set up tool for us and would be fairly easy for residents and other customers to receive our message and talk to us," he says. "Anybody can be up and running with an account which can be as private or as open as they like in a few minutes. You can set up your own community, or a local community as we do."
Most of the tweets have been short news bulletins on what the council is doing, reflecting the news content of the website, but it can also give people the opportunity to engage in a mini-dialogue. Recently there was a little surge of questions about new recycling services; Cross says that it prompted conversations within the council and that his team was able to reply the following day.
This worked more quickly than if the communications had been by email, as people are not looking for the same volume of detail when using Twitter.
In addition, Cross says that monitoring messages plays an important part in understanding residents' concerns, and that the service reaches some people who would otherwise be beyond reach. While most Twitter users are also quite web savvy, many are not the type to take an interest in the public sector on the internet, but are more inclined to respond to the short messages and chatty tone of the service. He does not exaggerate the effect, but believes it is helping to reach a few extra people.
"It acts as a safety net, providing an extra way of reaching those who we were not getting through to via other channels," he says. "If we can make ourselves available it does provide an extension of our reach." He adds that while the number of service requests through the channel is still relatively low, it is increasing.
There are opportunities for special initiatives. In April Hillingdon made its call centre available to support the Comic Relief effort, and a member of the public relations team was present to update followers through Twitter on what was going on through the evening. Cross says that could not have been done any other way.
Looking forward, there are plans to create more accounts linked to specific services, although the decisions about which ones are still to be made. This will correspond with an effort to get more people involved, so the content is provided not just by the communications team but a wider range of council officials.
He acknowledges the limitations of the service, but sees it as a significant element in the council's use of web channels. "It's offered us an exciting new of way of doing things," he says.
Leeds City Council has also been using Twitter to communicate with residents, through a handful of feeds managed by its corporate communications department, and 10 or so put out more informally by teams working in specific areas. The latter group includes the council's pest control team, and the South Leeds Hub, a community centre for young people in the city.
"The beauty of this to my mind is that some of these are now being generated by the community," says Dylan Roberts, the council's head of ICT. He says the council has used it mainly as an information tool so far, and has not looked into what type of people are using the service, but that there has been some worthwhile interaction with the public on the service based feeds. Also, he feels much of the value for council officers comes from getting involved in relevant communities set up by outside groups. He cites the Yorkshire Post as one of those attracting the most activity, and says the council is currently encouraging groups in the Chapeltown area to start using the service.
"Our philosophy is to try to encourage people to look into other communities of interest and get into this," he says, adding that there is an emphasis on engaging with groups rather than individual citizens.
One of the main benefits for council officers is to follow and learn from the conversations in such groups. "Overall it's a different means of gathering intelligence an obtaining customer insight," he says.
Leeds has no formal plan in place to develop the practice further, but Roberts says it is regarded as a significant element of the council's desire to make use of social networking tools. "The question now is how can we encourage people in the community to start using these sort of tools to engage with us?" he says.
It is also possible in some cases for people to aggregate Twitter feeds around specific interests. The Tweetminster service was set up to enable people to follow MPs and parliamentary candidates through its website and mobile phone links. It has been allowed to place a widget on Parliament's website which aggregates the feeds and sends them to the follower in real time.
Tweetminster founder Alberto Nardelli says that since it was founded in December 2008 the number of MPs on the service has increased from four to 78, with another 150 candidates for the next election also onboard, and that it has had up to 20,000 visitors.
"We don't automatically pick up the MPs using Twitter, but the majority using the tool are on Tweetminster," he says. Many of the participants have informed the service that they have begun tweeting, and others have come to them through supporters who are aware of the service, which begins to pick up their tweets once their identity has been verified.
"It would be hard for an MP to be on Twitter without us finding out," Nardelli says. "We don't need formal approval by MPs because Twitter accounts are public. What we do is bring them together and provide analytic services."
This involves identifying trends in what MPs are talking about, filtering out irrelevant terms and seeing how it matches what is in the news. "One of the reasons it has been successful is that it does not ask anything of the politicians or the users," he says.
"Its appeal is very similar for both groups. From the politicians' perspective they have a chance to communicate with a large number of people without going through a large number of intermediaries. It's not just their Twitter followers but many more who can read what they are saying. Also, they can interact with people as individuals; they would not get much space to do so in the press."
This reflects one of the advantages of Twitter as a whole – that while it keeps messages very short, it does encourage a chattier, more personal approach that often does not come across in more formal statements. That is not to say it is completely free of party discipline – any politician would have to be careful not to contradict the party line through Twitter statements – but the more immediate character of the medium gives it more freedom from the party spin machines.
"The message is immediate, so they don't seek approval or use the official line," Nardelli says. He also suggests that readers will quickly detect any individual spin in politicians' messages.
In recent months it has released the Tweetminster Wire desktop application, which pulls together relevant conversations and allows users to access streams from their selected MPs, candidates, political parties, government departments and Downing Street. It also enables them to take part in conversations, search for keywords and compare a term or name with the news stories of the day.
Nardelli describes this as a "social Bloomberg (the financial information service) for UK politics" that improves communications for everyone involved.
"Our hope is for visitors to the parliament website to gain a greater insight into the lives of the people that make up UK politics, in a breakthrough bid to improve trust and communications between electorates and their voters, in a sector that is typically seen as guarded," he says.
Tweetminster is currently running on investment funds that are allowing it build its user base while it examines how it can develop more commercial services. In the meantime, Nardelli says that it is helping its users to better understand where politicians stand on various issues, and giving the politicians the opportunity to learn from the feedback they receive.
He also provides some advice for any officials or politicians who plan to use Twitter to reach out to a community: "The key thing is to be genuine and engaging."
It will probably be a year or two before we can see whether the service can really make a difference to public services and politics, but it will have a better chance if the people receiving tweets are more ready to accept the messages they convey.
